Emergent metabolic cooperation in communities of microbes that maximise growth rate by optimal protein expression

A mathematical framework shows that microbial communities can reach a growth-rate–maximizing equilibrium where optimal protein expression strategies and inferred community composition jointly outcompete all alternative strategy sets.

• Why it matters: Metabolic exchanges make species strategies interdependent, but existing single-species resource-allocation models do not capture how ecological feedback shapes mutualistic or commensal relationships.
• What they did: The model treats each species as a selfish optimiser allocating finite biosynthetic resources to protein synthesis based on its current metabolite environment, using reaction kinetics and a single coupled optimisation.
• The result: In example communities, positive interactions like commensalism, mutualism, syntrophy, and division of labour emerge from feedback where metabolite producers are inhibited by their own excreted byproducts.

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